Brevo vs Freshsales

Brevo and Freshsales are two platforms designed to enhance customer engagement and sales management, each with a distinct focus. Brevo specializes in multi-channel communication, offering tools for email marketing, SMS campaigns, and customer engagement. Freshsales, by contrast, integrates AI-driven insights, sales automation, and communication tools, catering to teams prioritizing a data-driven approach to managing sales pipelines. In this blog post, we’ll compare their key features to help you decide which platform suits your needs—or if folk might offer a more balanced alternative with user-friendly contact management and customization options.

What is Brevo?

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platform tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. Brevo offers a wide range of tools, including email and SMS marketing, chat, CRM, and marketing automation to help businesses effectively engage with their audience across multiple channels.

Key features of Brevo

• Marketing platform: Provides tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, as well as marketing automation to improve multi-channel campaign engagement and streamline marketing efforts.
• Sales platform: Helps manage pipelines and track sales activities with tools like automated deal tracking, meeting scheduling, and call recording, making it easier for teams to follow leads and close deals.
• Conversations platform: Allows businesses to offer customer support through live chat, a shared inbox, and multi-channel communication solutions, ensuring seamless customer interaction.
• Customer data platform: Enables businesses to unify, manage, and analyze customer data across platforms with a multi-table data model, sourcing library, and customer analytics, improving data-driven decisions.
• Messaging API: Provides APIs for sending emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, with features for transactional emails, inbound parsing, and integrations with other applications for customized communication.
  

What is Freshsales?

Freshsales is a CRM platform by Freshworks designed to help businesses streamline their sales processes with AI-powered tools and automation. It provides features like lead scoring, deal tracking, email and call management, and workflow automation to enhance efficiency and drive conversions. Freshsales also integrates communication and sales in one place, offering tools for personalized outreach and detailed insights to improve sales strategies.

Key features of Freshsales

• AI-powered insights: Freshsales leverages AI to provide recommendations, predict deal outcomes, and offer actionable insights to improve sales strategies.
• Lead scoring: Automatically prioritizes leads based on their engagement and likelihood to convert, helping sales teams focus on high-value opportunities.
• Deal tracking: Provides a visual sales pipeline to track deals through various stages and monitor progress in real time.
• Email and call management: Integrates email and phone communication, allowing users to manage interactions directly from the platform.
• Workflow automation: Automates repetitive tasks like sending follow-up emails or updating deal statuses, reducing manual work and improving efficiency.

Brevo vs. Freshsales: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of Brevo and Freshsales and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

Brevo's pipeline feature offers custom deal pipelines to manage the sales process effectively. It allows teams to track deals across stages and organize tasks for follow-ups and meetings. Users can customize deal stages to match their sales cycle and automate repetitive tasks, with support for bulk contact import to link contacts and deals for streamlined organization. Basic analytics provide data insights, though further customization may be needed for specific requirements.
Freshsales, on the other hand, provides a visual sales pipeline with real-time tracking of deals through various stages. Its drag-and-drop functionality allows easy movement of deals, offering a clear overview of progress. Integrated tools such as lead scoring and AI insights enhance deal management by identifying priorities and predicting outcomes. While designed for simplicity, Freshsales' pipeline is heavily focused on sales workflows, which might limit flexibility for teams needing broader project or task tracking capabilities.

2. Ease of use

Brevo is designed with user-friendliness in mind, offering an intuitive interface that allows users to navigate its features effortlessly. Freshsales also prioritizes ease of use, providing a straightforward setup and a clean, organized dashboard that makes managing sales processes seamless.

3. Contact enrichment

Brevo includes contact enrichment capabilities as part of its Customer Data Platform. This feature allows businesses to unify, manage, and sync customer data, making it easier to create a more complete customer profile. The Sourcing Library and Customer Analytics & BI tools within this platform suggest that Brevo can pull in additional data points and provide insights.

4. Outreach

Brevo's outreach capabilities are primarily centered around its Marketing Platform, which includes tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing. These features allow businesses to reach their audience across multiple channels, creating a cohesive outreach strategy. The platform also offers automation options, enabling users to set up campaigns that send messages at optimal times based on customer behavior.
Freshsales includes outreach tools designed to manage customer communication through email, phone, and chat. You can send personalized email campaigns and track engagement metrics, such as open and click-through rates, directly from the platform. The integrated phone feature supports call tracking and logging, while chat tools allow real-time communication with leads and customers. While these features provide a centralized approach to outreach, they are primarily focused on sales communication and may lack the depth of functionality found in dedicated marketing or multi-channel outreach platforms.

5. Automation

Brevo offers automation across several of its platforms. Within the Marketing Platform, Brevo provides marketing automation tools that enable users to set up automated email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns based on customer actions and behavior. The Sales Platform includes automation for repetitive tasks, such as reminders for follow-ups and meetings, helping streamline the sales process. Additionally, Brevo’s AI for email feature supports automated personalization.
Freshsales includes automation features designed to streamline repetitive tasks and enhance workflow efficiency. You can automate processes such as assigning leads, updating deal stages, and sending follow-up emails based on predefined triggers or conditions. The platform also supports workflow automation to manage complex sales processes, helping teams stay consistent in their activities. While these tools reduce manual effort, setting up advanced automations may require time and familiarity with the system’s configuration options.

6. Integration

Brevo offers extensive integration options, connecting with over 150 digital tools, including CRM, CMS, e-commerce, and analytics platforms. This allows businesses to easily sync data across systems, streamlining workflows and enhancing the functionality of their existing tech stack. Freshsales integrates with tools like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Mailchimp, as well as Freshworks products such as Freshdesk and Freshchat, to streamline workflows. These integrations support email, calendar, marketing, and customer support, enhancing the platform’s functionality.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Brevo integrates AI into its platform, particularly within its Marketing Platform. The AI tools in Brevo are focused on enhancing email marketing, such as AI for email that helps personalize and optimize content to increase engagement. Freshsales includes AI integration through its Freddy AI. This feature provides predictive analytics, lead scoring, and actionable insights to help you prioritize opportunities and forecast sales outcomes. Freddy AI can also analyze past interactions to recommend the best times for follow-ups and suggest next steps for deals. While these tools aim to enhance decision-making and efficiency, they may require familiarity with AI-driven workflows to maximize their effectiveness.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Brevo and Freshsales.

Brevo  prices

Brevo has a limited free version that gives you access to 300 emails. After that, the price plans provide you with the number of emails you can send per month. As well as other features. You then also have the option of customizing your plan, so that it can be based on the number of emails you send a month and the number of contacts. The following is an overview of their annual plan.

• Starter: Starting from $8.08/month.
• Business: Starting from $16.17/month.
• Enterprise: Undisclosed.

Freshsales prices

Through Freshworks, Freshsales is available as a suite, or as a standalone product. The following is a highlevel overview of Freshsales as a standalone product.

• Growth: Starts from $9/user/month.
• Pro: Starts from $39/user/month.
• Enterprise: Starts from $49/user/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Brevo  and Freshsales

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. folk can support multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment, and more. folk can also grow with you as your business scales. As it supports solopreneurs, small to mid-size teams, and large enterprises.

Key features

• Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
• Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

Brevo vs. Freshsales: What's the verdict?

When choosing between Brevo and Freshsales, consider how Brevo excels in multi-channel marketing and communication, making it ideal for businesses focused on customer engagement across various platforms. While Freshsales offers robust AI-powered tools and automation for sales-centric organizations looking to enhance efficiency and conversion rates. However, for companies seeking a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free.